English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Future Of Inklings Studies: Keynote Panel Discussion (4 June 2016), Joe Ricke, Diana Glyer, Sørina Higgins, Colin Duriez

Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016

Transcription of panel discussion with Diana Gyler, Sørina Higgins, Colin Duriez, and Joe Ricke. (Transcribed and edited by Joe Ricke.)

The Image Of The Library In The Life And Work Of Charles Williams, Michael Paulus

SPU Works

This presentation explores the role and image of the library in the life and work of Charles Williams.

The Struggle To Communicate: Art, Embodiment, And Overcoming Isolation In The Text And Illustrations Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Hallie Anne Brinkman

Honors Projects

The following paper, at its heart, consists of an exploration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, as well as of three sets of its illustrations by Gustave Doré, Hunt Emerson, and Ed Young. This task is approached with a few central questions in mind, questions drawn both from Coleridge’s other philosophical works and, primarily, from the poem itself: is a work of art a “thought” or a “thing”? How do human beings, isolated in their physical bodies, communicate and connect? How might an exploration of the poem in conjunction with its illustrations – a layering of …

Stealing Revelation: A Screenplay Of The Thief Accompanied By A Religious Analysis, Jean E. Sleight

Honors Projects

Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief follows the story of a thief who seeks to steal an item for fame and glory and to save his country. Though he initially does not believe in the gods, he finds that they exist and are more involved in his life than he would want them to be. The screenplay is a loyal adaptation of the book. The analysis follows the thief’s journey from skepticism to faith and draws a comparison between the gods in the novel and the Christian God.

Golden Fantasy: An Examination Of Generic & Literary Fantasy In Popular Writing, Zechariah James Morrison

Honors Projects

This essay attempts to analyze critical theory concerning the division between generic fantasy fiction and higher fantasy literature. In examining how these two different types of fantasy writing are identified by popular criticism, the space in-between is defined and labeled "golden fantasy". This kind of fantasy is identified by maintaining a balance between subversive originality, and derivative reproduction, and is generally popular among consumers and academics as a source of both entertainment and scholarly research. The essay is then followed by 3 original chapters by the essay writer, in an attempt to demonstrate some of the elements of golden fantasy …

"Follow The Bodies": (Re)Materializing Difference In The Era Of Neoliberal Multiculturalism, Briana Grace Brickley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines a transnational literary archive in addition to analyzing shifting U.S. American cultural and political landscapes, and shows how critically attending to the various terms, figures, and valences of corporeality opens generative avenues for addressing the contemporary historical conjuncture, often referred to as the neoliberal capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism, understood here to be a complex, diffuse ideology that manifests in part as a number of broadsweeping economic changes—including widespread deregulation and privatization, the increasing influence of international financial organizations, governmental cuts in social spending, and structural adjustment programs for the formerly colonized nations of the global south—operates in …

Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. Through this focus …

Paratextuality And Contemporary Narrative: The Physical Object As A Storytelling Device, James Mason

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines how the physical and para-textual features (title, cover, front matter, page numbers, footnotes, glossary, etc.) of a book may be used as a vehicle for narrative discovery. Often, reading requires the use of extra-textual knowledge—that which comes from outside the book—to gain a proper understanding of the narrative. Intra-textual knowledge—that which occurs within the confines of the text—is more accessible, but still requires a great deal of foreknowledge to understand. However, contemporary novels that use the paratext for storytelling offer the same amount of accessibility to the reader while disrupting normal reading patterns. Thus, new readings patterns …

Fragmentation And Multiplicity In Cuban-American Identity: In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd By Ana Menéndez And Memory Mambo By Achy Obejas, Daimys E. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Maria Lugones offers a new way of perceiving the world, which makes visible that fragmentation is not a valuable and transgressive understanding of identity, as Western philosophy and some political theory suggests. What Lugones believes in, as a strategy of resistance to the dominant gaze, is multiplicity – mestizaje. Using Lugones’s framework, this thesis will look at the different aspects of Cuban-American characters in In Cuba I was a German Shepherd by Ana Menéndez and Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas. Each novel offers insight into how characters develop and understand themselves (and others) when they use language that shows that …

2016 Printed Program

Colloquium Schedules

No abstract provided.

Edgar Allan Poe And Alan Parsons: All That We See Or Seem Is Nevermore, Kimball R. Gardner

Student Works

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, and several critics and experts agree that he was well ahead of his time. As a result, he has had heavy influence on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One group that he impacted greatly was the progressive rock band the Alan Parsons Project. This group recorded an album titled Tales of Mystery and Imagination—an homage to Poe and his works.

This paper investigates two of Poe's poems: "A Dream within a Dream" and "The Raven," and how the song adaptations by the Alan Parsons Project can …

Outside Classroom: Unstructured Outdoor Play In Early Childhood Education, Valerie Lockhart

Graduate Student Independent Studies

This independent study examines the benefits of unstructured outdoor play in early childhood education through the lens of an original children's book and correlative research.

Reflecting The Eternal: Dante's Divine Comedy In The Novels Of C. S. Lewis (Book Review), Gary L. Tandy

Faculty Publications - Department of English

No abstract provided.

Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics With An Ethic Of Care, Jared Sterling Colton

English Faculty Publications

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment …

The Need For Shadows: The Death Of The Ego For Virginia Woolf In Night And Day, Jennifer A. Beck Miss

Student Works

Following Woolf’s own belief that the human character and condition changed in 1910, Woolf examines in Night and Day the human condition by destroying the identity of Katharine and following her reconstruction of self to evaluate just how far the human character has changed and where this change will lead the modern novelist. Through a Freudian melancholic reading, we identify what Katharine has lost, the ambivalence that shadows cast upon her play in one’s self-discovery, and the death of her ego, which causes her to retreat into her imaginary world. Although Katharine fails to gain a new ego at the …

Daniel Defoe’S Literary Economies: The Shifting Role Of Narrative Uncertainty, Speculation, And Providence In Robinson Crusoe And Roxana., Terese J. Swords

Lawrence University Honors Projects

In my honors project, I analyze how Daniel Defoe’s first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719), and his last, Roxana (1724), offer shifting economic commentary regarding England’s emerging 18^th century credit economy. This shift does not come as too much of a surprise, as his first and last novel straddle the historic moment of the South Sea Bubble’s burst. Therefore, Defoe’s works, when analyzed sequentially, capture the evolving attitude towards value and credit that was occurring throughout all of England.

In my first chapter, “Crusoe’s Post Facto Journal Editing: ‘How wonderfully we are delivered when we are aware of it,’” I …

Broken Hearths: Melville's Israel Potter And The Bunker Hill Monument, John Hay

English Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Urgent News From The Front, Jennifer J. Gray

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This creative thesis is an original work in the genres of fiction and poetry. It consists of three short stories and a chapbook of poems. My work focuses on the ways we find to survive, to create meaning, and to connect to ourselves, to those around us, and to the world in which we live.

Advisor: Jonis Agee

Poe's Entangled Fiction: Quantum Field Theory In "The Colloquy Of Monos And Una" And "The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt", Jean A. Little

Theses and Dissertations

When seen among the constellation of Edgar Allan Poe's works culminating in Eureka, "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," take on an important role as vehicles for scientific contemplation. Similar to early quantum physicists, such as Einstein and Schrödinger, Poe uses macro-level analogies to explore the unity of individual entities, which becomes an important tenet of his explanation of the universe. His thought experiments also resemble those of modern physics in their approach to reality as probabilistic, an idea that finds its echo in quantum field theory, which distinguishes between observed particles and their …

Shakespeare, Orson Welles, And The Hermeneutics Of The Archive, Benjamin Lynn Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines certain theoretical underpinnings of the historical processes by which Shakespeare's history plays became the de facto collective memory of the events they depict, even when those events are misrepresented. The scholarly conversation about this misrepresentation has heretofore centered on Shakespeare's potential political motivations. I argue that this focus on a political, authorial intent has largely ignored the impact these historical distortions have had over the subsequent 400 years. I propose that, due to Shakespeare's unique place in the historical timeline of the development of collective memory, Shakespeare's historical misrepresentation in the history plays is a byproduct of …

From Epistolary Form To Embedded Narratological Device: Embedded Epistles In Austen And Scott, Tonja S. Vincent

Theses and Dissertations

The perception that the epistolary form was rejected by novelists during the Romantic Era has largely been accepted by scholars. However, in looking at the period's two most prominent authors, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, we see that the epistolary form remained vibrant long after its supposed demise. Throughout their careers, both Austen and Scott employed embedded letters as a tool to create authenticity. Both Austen and Scott use what I call "literary letters" to create a sense of realism in their novels that contributed to the rise of the novel. Scholars often claim that Austen eschewed the epistolary form …

How Do Law Students Develop Writing Expertise During Summer Internships? An Interview-Based Study, Jonathan Francisco Garcia

Theses and Dissertations

Many law students are required to take first-year writing courses. With the increased emphasis in legal education on practical skills training (Sullivan et al. 2007), legal writing scholars have begun exploring how these writing courses equip students with practical skills (Felsenburg and Graham 2010; Cauthen 2010). However, these scholars have not explored how summer internships serve as opportunities for students to practice the skills they gained in the classroom. Following the lead of writing studies scholars who examine the transition from classroom and workplace writing (Russell and Fisher 2009; Devitt 2004, Wardle 2004; Winsor 1990), this study explores how the …

Dislocating Camps: On State Power, Queer Aesthetics & Asian/Americanist Critique, Christopher Alan Eng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation argues that the history of Asian racialization in the United States requires us to grapple with the seemingly counterintuitive entanglement between “the camp” as exceptional space of biopolitical management and “camp” as a performative practice of queer excess. While each practice of camp has been theorized as exemplary of modernity, these considerations have been largely separated into studies of political economy on the one hand, and queer aesthetics on the other. Taken up predominantly in political philosophy and the social sciences, the former centers the death camps in Europe during World War II as epitomizing state violence within …

Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers …

Heavy Expectations: Reading Pregnancy In The Victorian Novel, Livia Arndal Woods

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation articulates the tendency of Victorian novels to make legible only the pregnant bodies of immodest characters who transgress gendered ideologies while the pregnant bodies of modest characters tend to go undescribed. Tracing the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth over the course of the long nineteenth century, my chapters demonstrate the function of moralizing narrative conventions in the representation of pregnancy in mid-Victorian novels, of a self-conscious use of free indirect diagnosis in high-Victorian fiction, and a shift at the fin-de-siècle from pregnancy as a signifier of morality to a symptom of unstable minds. The novels I read closely …

A Dark Record: Criminal Discourse And The African American Literary Project, 1721-1864, Brian Baaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A Dark Record charts the emergence and traces the evolution of a central figure in American culture, the myth of the black criminal. It does so both to explore the ideological effects of print, and to present an alternative history of African American literature. Historians have long maintained that the association of African Americans with crime solidified in our national culture during the post-Reconstruction period, the nadir for African American civil rights, with a corresponding rise in the over-policing of black individuals and communities. For its part, my study looks back from the post-Reconstruction period, and examines the role earlier …

Out Of The Best Books: Mormon Assimilation And Exceptionalism Through Secular Reading, Lauren Ann Fields

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to explore the relationship between Mormon assimilation, exceptionalism, and their endeavors in secular reading by analyzing Out of the Best Books (OOBB), a 1964–71 five-volume reading guide and reading program on secular reading established by the Mormon Church for its women’s organization, the Relief Society. Examining the approaches to secular literature in the OOBB program suggests that Mormons can respond to their competing desires to separate and assimilate by making efforts that fulfill both aspirations simultaneously rather than moving exclusively in one direction. Yet OOBB’s efforts to achieve both objectives did not amount to an entirely seamless …

Coming Out Of The Coffin As The Posthuman: Posthuman Rhetoric And Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse Series, Rebecca Ann Garcia

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In this article, I argue that the vampires in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels illustrate clearly the posthuman self in its connection beyond itself to other vampires, humans, and non-humans. Learning to co-exist becomes problematic in Harris’ series, where we encounter a “new” representation of vampire. These vampires have come out of the coffin, and their revelation allows us to explore how they can be viewed in connection to the human world and how their transcendence can be seen as a move toward posthumanism, as its particular blend of body and community help demonstrate what the self expanded could be. …

The Library Under The Sun: Knowledge And Vanity In Umberto Eco’S The Name Of The Rose, Elizabeth Lamont

Masters Theses

Umberto Eco’s debut novel The Name of the Rose is so saturated with theoretical conversations and allusions that it can be read as a work of critical theory almost as much as it can be read as the wonderful detective novel that so many people have enjoyed. This thesis approaches the novel accordingly, engaging with the theoretical questions and ideas presented in the novel and evaluating them based on a biblical worldview. The central theoretical questions in the novel revolve around what can be known and how. Many critics have argued that the novel answers these questions of epistemology in …

Death As Meridian: Paul Celan's Translations Of Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" And "Let Down The Bars, Oh Death", Alyssa Devey

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Celan's translations of Emily Dickinson's poems Because I could not stop for Death and Let down the Bars, Oh Death illuminate the global metaphor inherent in both poems' exploration of death. Celan's The Meridian speech, coupled with Dickinson's poems I saw no way and Tell all the truth, suggest that language can move in different directions across a globe at the same time. When these different lines meet, they reach a meridian of the spiritual and the material. As Celan translates Dickinson's two poems, he uses this global metaphor to place more emphasis on death and to further illuminate …